Top Story

Michael Lewis' new book "Flash Boys" has whipped up a furious tornado of criticism about high frequency trading. But the market and regulators need to resist the urge to ban the practice and instead embrace the notion of high frequency monitoring and surveillance.

Top Story

International banks and other global private entities need to ensure that they do more than pay lip service to the data privacy laws of sovereign states, writes Andrew Waxman of IBM's consulting practice.

Top Story

The SEC’s proposed Regulation SCI is intended to protect market technology from outages and technical glitches. But industry commentators contend the rule doesn’t include all market participants and underestimates the implementation costs. Here are five areas that market participants would like to change.

Top Story

Michael Lewis' new book "Flash Boys" has whipped up a furious tornado of criticism about high frequency trading. But the market and regulators need to resist the urge to ban the practice and instead embrace the notion of high frequency monitoring and surveillance.

Top Story

With the threat of rising rates on the horizon, banks are relying on existing “technologies” to avert the danger, such as duration risk, VaR and dynamic simulation, writes David Renz of SunGard's Ambit Treasury Management solution.

Merrill Lynch Turns 100 - 5 Core Principles That Led It This Far

On January 6 Merrill Lynch will celebrate its 100 year anniversary. Former Chairman of Merrill Lynch International and son of one of ML's founders, Winthrop H. Smith Jr. reflects on its colorful history.

Client Comes First

Prior to the 1970's, there were standards were preventing clients from receiving what they wanted, if they had a savings account and the government regulated it below inflation they couldn't aggregate accounts or access brokerage accounts easily. "You had to request a check and couldn't use a credit card," Smith explains. "The innovation Merrill Lynch came up with was a cash management account that brought together securities, credit card and checking accounts and gave ease of access to the client." That move helped to launch the private wealth side of the firm in 1970s-1980s.

Also back in 1970's there were fixed commissions on Wall Street, with no competition on price. "Don Regan was chairman of time. He argued for a negotiated rate which is not at all popular with peers on Wall Street," Win recalls, "In his view a company had to be competitive and those that did well would survive and those that didn't would go out of business, and that's what happened."

The first history of Merrill Lynch, Catching Lightning in a Bottle: How Merrill Lynch Revolutionized the Financial World, by Win Smith can be purchased here.

Wall Street & Technology encourages readers to engage
in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task.
However, Wall Street & Technology moderates all comments posted to our site,
and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory,
offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM.
Wall Street & Technology further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating
in said activities.